The Synology DiskStation DS712+, sold diskless and and populated with hard drives, is a two-bay network-attached storage box that clearly anticipates the future. This business-friendly box can connect to Synology's five-bay DX510 external expansion unitto accommodate up to seven drives. If you don't need more than two drives right now but suspect that your burgeoning data set may eventually require a bigger storage system, that combination could make sense. Beyond expandability, the DiskStation DS712+ offers Synology's capable operating system and excellent performance.

Among the DiskStation DS712+'s appealing hardware features are two front-locking drive bays; dual ethernet ports that support aggregation for faster throughput as well as failover (when one connection fails, the other takes over); three USB 2.0 ports for peripherals such as printers, additional external flash or hard drives, and Wi-Fi dongles; and a single eSATA port for fast external storage. Conspicuously absent is a USB 3.0 port, which the cheaper, more consumer-centric Synology DiskStation DS212+ NAS box provides.

With a healthy 1GB of DDR3 memory and an Intel Atom D425 1.8GHz CPU on board, the DiskStation DS712+ delivered exceptionally strong performance for a two-bay NAS box in our tests. It wrote 10GB of folders and mixed files at 55 megabytes per second and read them at 51 MBps. When dealing with a single large 10GB file, the DiskStation DS712+ bumped those numbers up to 79 MBps and 105 MBps, respectively. Only the four-bay QNAP TS-459 Pro II and the eight-bay QNAP TS-879 Pro performed better overall.

The DiskStation DS712+ is superfast and potentially vast (with the DX510 five-bay expansion unit), and it has a wonderful operating system. However, at $500 (as of March 23, 2012) without hard drives, and $790 as tested with 2TB of storage, it's for speed demons only, and the omission of USB 3.0 smacks of penny-pinching at this price. If you're an average user who doesn't need the expansion capabilities, the nearly as fast but less pricey DS212+ probably makes more sense.

At a Glance

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